No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Louis-Sebastien Mercier's New Words
Abstract
Louis-Sébastien Mercier opposed the language politics of both
Right and Left during the French Revolution. His 1801
La Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler,
ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles
is a kind of antidictionary, promoting linguistic innovation rather
than standardization or reform. In this work, as in others, Mercier
vindicates the creativity of speakers and writers against the "caprice"
of institutions. "The life of a language," he writes, "is that of the
people to whom it belongs."
... In this regard, he takes after Mercier, who was cautious about positing too great a breach between the old and the new order. 98 For both commentators, the Revolution threatened to overshadow or obscure continuities of injustice and the ways new structures of the polity could replicate them. "Are Representative Governments merely at bottom Tyrannies too?" Carlyle asks (1:226). ...
... Addiction readers who are interested in the history of ideas may wish to review the story of the French Academy and its resistance to new concepts and words that did not originate in the French royal court. For example, according to Rosenberg (2003), members of the Academy did everything in their power to suppress publication of Antoine Furetière's unsanctioned dictionary of new terms in 1690, and to assert an exclusive authority over the French language. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) ...
... Addiction readers who are interested in the history of ideas may wish to review the story of the French Academy and its resistance to new concepts and words that did not originate in the French royal court. For example, according to Rosenberg (2003), members of the Academy did everything in their power to suppress publication of Antoine Furetière's unsanctioned dictionary of new terms in 1690, and to assert an exclusive authority over the French language. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) ...
... Addiction readers who are interested in the history of ideas may wish to review the story of the French Academy and its resistance to new concepts and words that did not originate in the French royal court. For example, according to Rosenberg (2003), members of the Academy did everything in their power to suppress publication of Antoine Furetière's unsanctioned dictionary of new terms in 1690, and to assert an exclusive authority over the French language. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) ...
... Addiction readers who are interested in the history of ideas may wish to review the story of the French Academy and its resistance to new concepts and words that did not originate in the French royal court. For example, according to Rosenberg (2003), members of the Academy did everything in their power to suppress publication of Antoine Furetière's unsanctioned dictionary of new terms in 1690, and to assert an exclusive authority over the French language. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) ...
... Addiction readers who are interested in the history of ideas may wish to review the story of the French Academy and its resistance to new concepts and words that did not originate in the French royal court. For example, according to Rosenberg (2003), members of the Academy did everything in their power to suppress publication of Antoine Furetière's unsanctioned dictionary of new terms in 1690, and to assert an exclusive authority over the French language. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.) ...
Cambridge Core - History of Ideas - Conflict and Enlightenment - by Thomas Munck
À l’époque où l’Abbé Desfontaines publie son Dictionnaire néologique, on réfléchit surtout à la justesse des mots dans l’objectif de garantir un style correspondant au bon usage. Il ne s’agit pas de juger le langage en termes de créativité, de dégradation, d’effets de mode langagiers ou de ‘particularité’ de la langue, comme à l’heure actuelle. En revanche, le débat s’inscrit notamment dans la volonté de régler l’usage et d’établir des normes fixes pour le français, la langue nationale commune. On rejoint ici, certes, les travaux des premiers dictionnaires et des Remarqueurs, mais aussi ceux portant sur la synonymie, comme La justesse de la langue françoise de Gabriel Girard (1718). Cet article situe l’œuvre et les méthodes utilisées par Desfontaines dans ce contexte.
Balzac's lively interest in linguistic invention is related to the widespread fascination with neologism displayed by such contemporaries of his as Charles Nodier and Brillat-Savarin. His self-conscious espousal of lexical innovation in his early journalism is both satirical and creative, as may be seen from the continuity presented by La Peau de chagrin. It forms a core element in the evolution of a narrative discourse that advertises a keen awareness of the ambiguous status of its medium.
This article, which forms the context for a study of neologism in Balzac's Comédie humaine (forthcoming in MLR), examines the fascination with neologism exhibited in early nineteenth-century France by linguists, dictionary makers, and a number of creative writers, most notably Charles Nodier, whose recurrent interest in the subject is traced across writings spanning his entire career. If neologism retained its status as a subject of controversy, with Nodier, notwithstanding his overt admiration for Rabelais, displaying notable ambivalence towards its various manifestations, its ex-ploitation was central to attempts to give expression to a world obsessed with fashion and change. Other writers discussed include Sébastien Mercier and Brillât-Savarin.
Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself-in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies-as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure-how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?-are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the matterof the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event-the reading of works of fiction-come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true-to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real? Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of the literaryas an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects.
This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.
Thèse réalisée en cotutelle avec l'Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), sous la direction de M. Michel Delon. Cette thèse a pour objectif d’analyser les représentations du temps historique dans le Tableau de Paris (1781-1788) et le Nouveau Paris (1798) de Louis Sébastien Mercier et de faire voir comment elles se transforment sous l’impact de la Révolution française, elle qui oblige les contemporains à réévaluer leur rapport au temps. Ces œuvres s’inscrivent dans la tradition de la littérature panoramique : l’auteur y décrit l’état de la capitale et donne à voir les mœurs de ses habitants. Si Mercier s’attache à peindre la physionomie actuelle de Paris, il en vient, au fil de ses promenades, à décrypter le passé qui est enfoui, comme un palimpseste, sous la surface présente. L’espace urbain, ainsi peuplé des spectres du passé, fait cohabiter de multiples strates temporelles et donne l’image d’un temps dense au sein duquel différentes époques sont coprésentes. La persistance du passé pose toutefois problème : c’est pourquoi l’héritage antique et national se voit réévalué – voire éradiqué – afin de répondre aux exigences de l’idéologie progressiste. Avec la Révolution, de nouveaux outils conceptuels sont élaborés pour gérer le rapport avec le passé : si les révolutionnaires rejettent, après la Terreur, les entreprises d’épuration par la destruction, ils développent un nouveau mode de mise à distance du passé, la patrimonialisation. Celle-ci, par la conservation même, relègue paradoxalement le passé au rang d’histoire morte. Le futur occupe également une place de choix chez Mercier, auteur de l’un des premiers romans d’anticipation. Il s’exprime prioritairement sous deux formes, la dégénérescence et la régénération. Alors même qu’il décrit l’état actuel de la ville, Mercier anticipe sa ruine. Une étroite corrélation s’instaure alors entre la construction et la destruction, qui est son aboutissement inéluctable. Ce phénomène s’accompagne de modulations esthétiques majeures : l’évocation de la perte plonge l’auteur dans la mélancolie et teinte son style de lyrisme et d’élégie. Si la Révolution ne fait pas disparaître cet imaginaire, elle le met entre parenthèses et entrevoit surtout son avenir sous la forme optimiste de la régénération. Ce concept clé, qui alimente projets et utopies, fait cohabiter de multiples modèles temporels, tels que la rupture radicale, le retour à l’origine, la régénération instantanée et la construction nationale. Le fondement du projet de Mercier demeure néanmoins de capter la contemporanéité. Tentant de fixer par l’écriture la fugitivité du temps, l’auteur s’engage dans une course désespérée qui le condamne à être perpétuellement décalé par rapport à l’actualité qu’il cherche à saisir. Au-delà de cette dimension transitoire, Mercier confère au présent une certaine stabilité en l’élevant au rang d’histoire. Ce phénomène touche surtout l’histoire révolutionnaire : afin de terminer la Révolution, les contemporains l’érigent en objet historique et tentent d’en comprendre les mécanismes. Corrélativement, l’histoire révolutionnaire acquiert un statut esthétique. Les réformes poétiques appelées par Mercier depuis le début de sa carrière littéraire (contemporanéité des sujets, originalité stylistique, esthétique de la force et du contraste, invention poétique et néologie) trouvent un terrain d’expression particulièrement fertile dans la représentation de l’histoire récente. This dissertation analyzes the representation of historical time in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781-1788) and Nouveau Paris (1798) and seeks to explain how this representation was transformed by the French Revolution, a major event that changed the way contemporaries conceived their place in history. These two works are considered as panoramic literature: as he walks through the neighbourhoods of Paris, the author describes the state of the city of his day as well as its inhabitants’ customs. Although Mercier is mostly interested in painting the present, his exploration of the city leads him to exhume the past that lies, like a palimpsest, beneath the surface. Crowded with specters from the past, the urban space generates a form of temporal density resulting from the coexistence of various times. But the persistence of the past is also highly problematic: Mercier’s faith in progress implies a constant reevaluation – if not a rejection – of antique references and national heritage. After the 1789 disruptions, new conceptual tools were developed to manage the past. If revolutionaries rejected radical destruction after the traumatic experience of the Terror, they invented a new way to put the past aside – patrimony. It is, paradoxically, by its conservational function that patrimony relegates the past to a status of dead history. The future also occupies a large place in Mercier’s works. It is represented under two antithetic forms: degeneracy and regeneration. While he describes the physiognomy of the city of his day, the author anticipates its ruin and establishes a strong correlation between construction and destruction (its inescapable outcome). This pessimistic representation of time modifies his aesthetics: as he evokes the ineluctability of loss, the author deals with a melancholy which colours his style with lyricism and elegy. This imaginative world does not entirely disappear with the Revolution, but it is marginalized. After 1789, the future is viewed mainly through the optimistic and utopian notion of regeneration, in which several conceptions of time coexist (radical rupture, return to an uncorrupted original state, instantaneous regeneration, the building of national unity, etc.). Although Mercier oscillates between past and future, his main goal is to capture a sense of contemporaneousness. As he tries to immobilize the continuous flux of time by writing, he finds himself in a hopeless race in which he is condemned to be perpetually behind the current events he wishes to paint. But Mercier goes beyond the fugitive nature of time and grants the present a status of historical discourse. This historiographical dimension mainly concerns revolutionary history: in order to end the Revolution, contemporaries set it up as historical knowledge and hope to understand its complex evolution. As it acquires an historical status, present history also becomes an aesthetical object. Poetical reforms that had long been called for by Mercier (contemporary topics, stylistic originality, contrast and strength, aesthetical invention and neology) are fully integrated in the representation of recent history.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.